The homeless are often characterised as down-and-outs, drunks, drug addicts and beggars. But there are hundreds of "hidden homeless" families across Sussex - those who have lost their homes for a variety of reasons and are staying in guesthouses, on friends' floors or in other temporary accommodation. Rosie page reports.

  • "It was horrendous - there was this smell.
  • The room was so small that you could hardly walk between the bed and the furniture."

Pat - not her real name - was shocked to see where she and her family had to live.

They later discovered where the smell was coming from. Her son looked at the mattress on his bed.

"It had been wetted on so much it was covered in mould", she said.

Last November, Pat and her family were evicted from their private rented flat when the owner needed it back. She was not in arrears.

She applied to the council at the end of November and they were housed in St Catherine's Lodge, a bed and breakfast hotel in Kingsway, Hove.

In the same month, charity Shelter revealed there were almost 1,700 children and young people in temporary housing in Sussex - 596 of them in Brighton and Hove.

The city has an unusually high number of homeless 16 and 17-year-olds - 13 per cent compared with a national average of eight per cent.

Last year, 194 families with children in Brighton were accepted as homeless by the city council. Many are housed in B&Bs.

Local authorities have a duty to ensure homeless families with children are not in a B&B for more than six weeks. They are legally obliged not to keep anyone in a B&B for longer than that but, because St Catherine's is classed as a hostel, where tenants have an en-suite room with limited cooking facilities, they can be housed for up to six months.

Families in St Catherine's Lodge describe cramped rooms, mouldy mattresses, grills and hotplates thick with grease, fridges with congealed food, bathroom walls covered in black mould, rooms with fleas, water dripping from electrical fittings, doors that don't close.

Pat said: "There's a halfnaked old man who walks around the corridors. The corridors aren't safe at night and they often stink of vomit.

"We can't sleep because of all the shouting and fighting. One night I heard a woman screaming. The police are in and out.

"A woman came to the door one day - she'd been beaten up and had a black eye. She had her money taken off her by someone in here."

Pat is afraid for herself and her teenage son. But she said: "The housing department told me conditions were up to individual proprietors - there's no standardisation."

Some families with school-age children are placed in B&B hotels in Eastbourne, almost 20 miles away.

Saneh said she fled torture and persecution in Zimbabwe and her three children joined her. She said: "I don't know where my husband is or whether he is alive or dead."

They stayed in Brighton when they arrived but were housed in a one-bedroom flat in Eastbourne - with no heating or hot water - in January.

She and her children got up at 5am. The journey to their Brighton schools took an hour-and-a-half. To collect them Saneh had to stay in Brighton all day. She had no money.

A councillor with a major role in improving children's services says the authority doesn't place families with children in Eastbourne.

A housing officer, on the other hand, says temporary accommodation in Brighton and Hove has been full since September.

The council regularly houses people in Eastbourne - there are one or two families with schoolage children there at any time.

Saneh complained and her family was moved to St Catherine's Lodge. She said: "It was a nightmare.

We were given one room for me and my three children.

"Only one hotplate worked. There was no sink - only a basin and a bucket.

"It was very dirty - dirty bathroom, dirty mattresses, dirty blankets, dirty curtains, dirty linen, never collected."

Her two daughters were ten and 17 and her son 15.

They all lived in one room for four months.

One mother said: "Conditions at St Catherine's Lodge seem designed to demean homeless families - who aren't there because they want to be but due to unfortunate circumstances.

"The council should be aware of the suffering it's causing families because it can't be bothered to do anything".

Brighton and Hove City Council admits there is a problem with high numbers of young homeless but says it is working closely with organisations such as Hove YMCA to put things right.

Hove YMCA has praised the council's efforts, saying it is leading the way among local authorities by being the first city in the country to draw up a comprehensive Youth Homelessness Strategy to tackle homelessness until 2010.

The document was recognised as "best practice" by the Government recently.

A report published last November by Shelter, entitled Against the Odds, revealed the damaging impact that bad housing had on the lives of 1.6 million children.

Shelter says being forced to live in temporary accommodation can cause a host of problems that can affect a child's future.

Children who live in bad housing are twice as likely to be persistently bullied, almost twice as likely to suffer from poor health and twice as likely to be excluded from school.

They face severely disrupted education, physical and mental health problems and don't even have a place to play.

On average, children living in temporary accommodation miss a quarter of their schooling. The reality is that little has changed since Cathy Come Home 40 years ago.

Following the 2006 Government Green Paper, Every Child Matters, Brighton and Hove is the first council in the country to create a Children and Young People's Trust (CYPT) to deliver integrated children's services.

However, the Government does not include housing and homelessness in its proposals.

CYPT planning recognises the issue of homeless runaways but the children of the "hidden homeless"

have fallen through the net.

Dickensian housing conditions could seriously affect their future.